Walk Through It

An essay about getting along with people...

(This is the essay I intended to post right after the Super Bowl, but then people started shooting each other so I had dumber fish to fry and this got delayed until today.)

Back when I was drawing political cartoons for the Kansas City Star, on more than one occasion someone would meet me, recognize my name and say, “Y’know, I don’t agree with everything you draw.” To which I would respond, “Who do you agree with all the time, your wife?”

An insightful question that made those people realize I was also an asshole in person.

But think about it: nobody agrees with their wife and/or husband all the time and yet people stay married. (OK, actually about 50% of people stay married, but stop quibbling or we’ll never get anywhere.) So if people disagree with the person they have sex with and share a bathroom with – which is way more intimate than the sex part – why do they expect to agree with anybody else 100% of the time?

I started thinking about this because a while back former Star colleague Melinda Henneberger wrote a column about a friend and semi-Chiefs fan that was disinvited to a Super Bowl party because it was held in California and everybody else would be rooting for the 49ers.

Which poses that age-old question: so what?

But the dis-inviter felt that a Chiefs fan’s presence would make everybody else uncomfortable and might inhibit their pro-49er cheering, a position that made Melinda ask when did we all get so fragile?

A good question I’ll take a whack at answering.

TV and the Internet 

I’m going to sound like every Grumpy Old Man in the Long History of Grumpy Old Men when I say as a kid we had three TV channels (if you didn’t count that weird UHF channel that had a kiddy show hosted by someone who would later turn out to be a pedophile) and I’ll stop right there before I start talking about Conestoga wagons, Indian attacks and losing a sibling because he stepped on a rusty nail and we didn’t know jack shit about antibiotics.

Anyway…

Having a total of three TV channels meant we were all getting pretty much the same news from pretty much the same place and you just got to choose what chain-smoking anchor would give it to you. 

But now we have hundreds and hundreds of channels so you can get your news from the Communists (CNN) or the Nazis (Fox) and you never have to hear anything from anyone you don’t already agree with.

Same goes for the internet.

In the 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma some of the people who helped create social media admitted they were horrified by what it’s become and one of them said the whole goal is to keep you glued to your computer screen so they can continue to bombard you with ads and sell you stuff and the way they do that is to show you more of whatever you’ve already been looking at.

(Which is actually pretty stupid because after I bought a pair of sunglasses off the internet, for the next month I kept getting hit with ads for sunglasses and the one thing I didn’t need was the thing I just bought: sunglasses.)

In any case…

Somebody somewhere is keeping track of every keystroke and showing you more of what you seem to like and that means if two people with wildly different political philosophies do the exact same internet search – and here’s let’s go with me and Heinrich Himmler – I’m going to see different results than Heinrich, which is why comedian Bill Burr has called the internet I’m right.com which may or may not be true because I got that information off the internet.

The ability to avoid encountering any views or people you don’t already agree with recently led my 98-year-old mother to announce “People are all the same” and being a good son I pointed out that at this Stage of Her Life she knew about six people and three of them were dead.

I also said that unlike her, I occasionally left my house and my experiences with the Outside World convinced me that people definitely weren’t all the same and the fact that we disagreed about what people were like proved I was right.

(I gotta say there’s nothing like crushing the logic of a 98-year-old woman who hasn’t read a newspaper since the Nixon Administration and isn’t precisely sure what day it is to make you feel good about yourself.)

And now that I’ve taken a whack at my mom’s generation, I’ll give mine a shot.

Participation Trophies and Helicopter Parenting

For whatever reason My G-G-Generation decided our precious children should never ever never feel bad about anything so we stopped keeping score at games and gave everybody a participation trophy and you could never say anything even slightly negative like, “Timmy, you really seemed to have your head up your ass on that last play” because who knows what permanent damage that would cause Timmy and as a result of our misguided overprotectiveness our kids tend to be fragile as soap bubbles.

We also told them they could be anything they want to be which is total BS and if you don’t believe me, take your kid to a playground, give him a basketball and tell him to dunk it. The results of that experiment might demonstrate that your kid needs to take NBA power forward off his list of possibly career choices.

And while we’re on the subject of sports…

If you play basketball in Real Life you might get picked last or miss crucial shots or get fouled and have nobody call it, but if you play basketball video games instead you don’t need to worry about any of that and once you figure out the settings and which players to play – like LeBron James and Michael Jordan against a team of blind nuns – you don’t ever have to worry about losing either.

Bottom line, we tried to prevent our kids from being damaged which resulted in some really really bad damage: never encountering opposition or having negative experiences or developing emotional callouses and figuring out how to deal with the ups and downs of Real Life.

Which means you can’t have a Chiefs fan at your pro-49er party because the Chiefs might win and then you’d feel bad or the 49ers might win and they’d feel bad and dealing with negative experiences like a grown up is not one of the clubs you have in your bag.

So what’s the answer?

A policy of tolerance…with the exception of Deal Breakers

Early in my career I realized everybody who read a newspaper (which eventually became a lot fewer people than is good for a society) would know what I thought about controversial subjects like abortion, the death penalty and handgun control. Now let’s take those three issues to make a point and here it is; if people are honest, everybody’s controversial.

For instance, I was and am:

• Pro-Choice

• Anti-Death Penalty and…

• Think having a handgun in your house makes you more likely to get shot and if you’re worried about personal protection maybe you should invest in pepper spray and an irritable Rottweiler instead.

Now flip those positions and say I’m:

• Pro-Life

• Pro-Death Penalty and…

• Believe everybody should have access to fully automatic AR-15s and maybe Reaper drones and teachers should lecture from machine gun nests and the occasional fragmentation grenade isn’t over doing it.

Am I any less controversial?

And if you avoid forming any opinion at all and have no position on those issues, you’re then taking the position that women and/or babies are being killed, they’re talking about smothering convicted murderers who might later be proven innocent by DNA and tens of thousands of people are dying from gun violence every year and you’re so intellectually lazy and self-involved you don’t care enough to have an opinion about any of that.

Which sounds pretty controversial.

Once you accept that everybody is controversial in some way or another, you realize you’re going to have to deal with people you disagree with.

Not sure how I managed it, but I’ve got lots of friends who are Conservatives and once in a while we rub each other the wrong way, but disagreeing forces you to think about why you disagree and maybe modify your position and reluctantly admit all Republicans aren’t brain-dead morons or all Democrats aren’t demon-possessed marijuana-smoking baby killers and dealing with people you disagree with can make you a better person.

For instance:

I’ve got a Conservative friend in Dallas and we rarely agree on politics and call each other idiots when we talk about that subject, but then move on and talk about where to go to lunch or the Dallas Cowboys or why Old Men shouldn’t wear shorts in public. There are a million topics besides politics and learning how to still be friends while disagreeing on major political issues has been good for both of us.

If you don’t agree with anybody 100% of the time (and if you dig deep enough, you don’t) you have to accept their differences and agree to disagree with the exception of “deal breakers” and we all have to decide what those deal breakers are for ourselves.  

If you show up with a swastika tattooed on your neck, we’re not going to Applebee’s together and while I think Trump supporters are idiots and will continue to say so over and over again in the strongest terms possible, after I say it I’d still have a beer with one because I’ve got Trump supporters in my immediate family and I really need to drink large quantities of alcohol to get through family reunions and my mom saying dumb things like, “People are all the same.”

But unless you’re incredibly fragile, rooting for a different football team shouldn’t be a deal breaker (football stadiums are filled to the brim with people rooting for different teams) and as author Lawrence Block once wrote:

Winter’s no big deal,

Dress warm,

Walk through it.